Heather Yunger believes her cookies helped the Boston Bruins win the Stanley Cup in 2011. The steadfast and superstitious fan is sure the ritual of bringing to every home game her soft and chewy cookies she coined Black & Golds — dark chocolate with peanut butter chips to mirror the team’s colors — clinched the win. In the midst of the victory parade, Yunger decided she would quit her corporate job and start a cookie business. So the Dorchester resident took a job at a bakery and some business courses, and four years ago launched Top Shelf Cookies.

The CommonWealth Kitchen is organizing a special event for women and POC who want to launch their own food business this Friday. The nonprofit organization, that serves as a incubator specialized in food businesses, has prepared an opportunity to showcase some of the city’s diverse food community from local food places. Among the businesses from the CommonWealth Kitchen that attendants will be able to sample are:

It was a brisk November morning in Boston. Fall had settled in - orange, yellow, and red leaves littered the ground, and the harvest season in New England was drawing to a close. Despite the time of year, CommonWealth Kitchen was buzzing with activity. Based in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, the organization’s commissary kitchen was busy working to extend the season for regionally-grown food by processing produce from New England farms into purees, sauces, and other food service items.

The eatery, called 50Kitchen, last year’s winner of the Fields Corner Collaborative Business Pitch Competition, will serve fast-casual fusion-style food inspired by Southern American and Asian American cuisine, courtesy of chef Anthony Caldwell, at its 1452 Dorchester Ave. location.

Commonwealth Kitchen, which received $168,000, also to purchase specialized equipment for its manufacturing operation that focuses primarily on processing Massachusetts grown and harvested food products.

When you need a cooling reprieve on a sizzling afternoon, there are plenty of refreshing drinks out there. But there’s a unique one to lately hit the shelves — Lazy Bear Tea, a healthy beverage brewed with cascara (which means husk or peel in Spanish), the leftover coffee cherries, sun-dried once the beans are removed. The company sources the cascara from a small family farm in Nicaragua. The coffee-based tea tastes little like coffee, but more like a light black tea with a copper hue and pleasant sweetness. The line includes three choices — natural, flavored with lemon and agave, or mint. A 12-ounce bottle ($3.50 to $4.99) has 55 milligrams of caffeine, about the same amount as a cup of coffee. Cambridge resident and cofounder Daniela Uribe came up with the idea to create the beverages and partnered with Drew Fink and Erik Ornitz, both Harvard Business School students, who were able to get some funding from one of the school’s entrepreneurship programs.

Food businesses in particular are popular ventures, said Lane. To serve that demand, she said, “We offer a 13-week program called Food Biz 101 with Commonwealth Kitchen, which has participation from 60 percent women and 90 percent people of color.”